If you’re used to a messy desk, cleaning it will probably be a temporary measure. Credit card companies have discovered that if a person carries $2,000 in debt with a $3,000 credit limit, the… | Continue reading
Not education, learning. Education is a model based on scarcity, compliance and accreditation. It trades time, attention and money for a piece of paper that promises value. But we learn in ways tha… | Continue reading
“What’s a fax machine?” There are people working today who don’t know. In the 1980s, I produced a book about VCR tapes and video stores that’s so obsolete, you canR… | Continue reading
Business models rework the world. Organize assets. Add labor. Sell something for enough money that you get to do it again, but more. That’s how we ended up with a $5 chicken in many pots, a c… | Continue reading
It’s true, at least for now, that there are plenty of fish in the sea. And it’s also true that shooting fish in a barrel is pretty easy if there are enough fish and the barrel is small … | Continue reading
The hall of fame, any hall of fame, is an odd thing. On one hand, it celebrates the status quo and scarcity. On the other, it’s a mark of transitions, evolution and diversity. The people indu… | Continue reading
The 16-foot canvas Prospector canoe made by the Chestnut Canoe Company is not the fastest or the lightest or the cheapest canoe but it is an elegant canoe. Practical elegance is something that is a… | Continue reading
A common writer’s trick is to introduce a new term by telling you its origin or what the initials stand for. SMERSH, KAOS, THRUSH, UNCLE, GIF, NFT, SCUBA, CIA, NSA… you get the idea. Bu… | Continue reading
Of course it does, you made it. If you shipped it to the world (or even showed it to a colleague) it might be because you liked it. You made it for yourself. But if your music, your graphic design,… | Continue reading
When each car is separate, they’re dumb, and they break one at a time. When they are part of a networked system, one software glitch can break them all at once. If we use power off the grid, … | Continue reading
Humans differentiated themselves 100,000 years ago by developing the ability to have a detailed memory. Not just “where did I hide the acorns” but rich and diverse memories about people… | Continue reading
Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value. Like a Pokemon card, or a… | Continue reading
Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value. Like a Pokemon card, or a… | Continue reading
Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value. Like a Pokemon card, or a… | Continue reading
We see it all the time, and not just in the store, with a catalog or on a website. You can tell the committed students from the ones who are simply skating by. You can figure out who’s readin… | Continue reading
Who decides the rhythm of your day? When are you at your best, when do you drag? In the old days, when we worked on the assembly line or even in sync at the office or at school, there were good rea… | Continue reading
As I write this, they’re laying a brick wall outside of my window. Each brick weighs about five pounds. There are a thousand bricks in this wall. And every brick is moved, one by one, from th… | Continue reading
Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford are always full. The value of their degree is largely based on scarcity. There are always more people who want to get in than they will allow. That’s intention… | Continue reading
We often send metaphorical letters to our past selves, berating the choices we’ve made. We express regret about missed opportunities or past mistakes. It’s easy to blame our younger sel… | Continue reading
The perfect avocado… Sometimes they’re too hard, and often, they’re rotten. But every once in a while, you’ll nurture an avocado until it’s at the peak state of flavor… | Continue reading
That’s the opposite of, “count me out.” Either you seek to unite and be part of it. Or to divide and watch it go away. Whatever ‘it’ might be. We can seek to trigger t… | Continue reading
The windmills aren’t the problem, it’s the tilting. In Cervantes’ day, ’tilting’ was a word for jousting. You tilted your lance at an enemy and attacked. Don Quijote w… | Continue reading
If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many thing… | Continue reading
If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many thing… | Continue reading
We might be settling scores or we might be opening doors. It’s up to us. Grievance and possibility have confusing roots. Grievance isn’t about grieving. In fact, it’s the opposite… | Continue reading
Weight is a useful measure. 10 pounds is twice as much as 5 pounds. Measuring things and then ranking them effectively enables us to make better choices and to scale up our operations. Sometimes, t… | Continue reading
For most products and services, we rate them on a curve. Of course the seat on the discount airline was cramped, but that’s okay because it was cheap. Of course this Camry doesn’t look … | Continue reading
“Where do you get your ideas?” The thing is, everyone has ideas. All the time, every day. Having ideas is part of the human condition. The right questions might be: Are you exposing you… | Continue reading
Because wishes don’t always come true, but wishing takes a lot of time and energy and focus. What you wish for determines how you’re spending a juicy part of your day. If you wish for s… | Continue reading
The phone company didn’t care what sort of conversation you were having. The call was the call. Same is true for cable–what you watched didn’t matter to them. The reason retail ba… | Continue reading
If there’s scarcity, we need to make choices. Who gets hired, what website shows up at the top of the search results, who gets a loan. And while we can make those choices on a case by case ba… | Continue reading
How to get better at graphic design… There are more amateur and semi-pro graphic designers working today than at any point in human history. Presentations, instagram posts, websites, the cove… | Continue reading
“What’s different?” Because we rarely notice what’s the same. It’s not easy to focus on the chronic. In fact, it’s really difficult. Too often we are in organiza… | Continue reading
The new ritual, even more than checking the windows and doors before bed, is to check the incoming. Doom scroll a bit, check Slack and email and make sure there are no loose ends. And then the ritu… | Continue reading
By every measure I can think of, ranked-choice voting is a superior way to hold a modern election. When a group of people want to decide something at the national or even the organizational level, … | Continue reading
Once we decide to make a difference, it’s easy for doubt to set in. Because making a difference causes change, and change is scary. One way through the fear is with community. Groups of peopl… | Continue reading
Is ‘nimble’ a good thing? Should we seek to be flexible, resilient and quick to be able to shift and adapt? Because often, it seems as though we work to create an environment where it&#… | Continue reading
In the early days of tech, the acronym of choice was, “Read the friggin manual.” If an engineer uttered RTFM in your direction, it meant that whatever happened was your fault. Tech is a… | Continue reading
But what if you weren’t? What if you replaced “doing” with “improving” or “reinventing” or “transforming”? When we do our job, what happens to … | Continue reading
The internet clearly has a trust problem. As with most things, it helps to start with the Grateful Dead. After their incarnation as the Warlocks, they became more than a band. It was a family on th… | Continue reading
“Yet”. You can append it after any sentence related to your journey of achievement and contribution. “I haven’t finished the project” “I haven’t learned ho… | Continue reading
People talk about ego like it’s a bad thing. But our desire to do a good job, our self-trust, our willingness to dance with fear–these are fuel if used properly. Egomania pushes us to i… | Continue reading
Quick! Get on Myspace, it’s where all the good stuff is. Wait! Better build your following on Facebook. It’s a land rush and once you amass enough followers… And Pinterest. Defini… | Continue reading
Most people build a Keynote or Powerpoint presentation in a very direct way: I have things I want to say, I will list them, slide by slide. Over time, you might get fancier or more skilled at the t… | Continue reading
Do you have to use all the time in the brainstorming session? Fill in the entire page of your creativity notebook? It turns out that many of the best ideas we have start out as filler. Stuff in the… | Continue reading
They’re different. Knowledge changes all the time. When we engage with the world, when we encounter data or new experiences, our knowledge changes. But belief is what we call the things that … | Continue reading
We have windowpanes because glass used to be really expensive. Panes allowed us to use smaller sheets, with the added bonus that if one broke, you could simply replace part of the window. Today, bi… | Continue reading
Fashion is everywhere. It’s not simply the clothes you chose to wear today (and the ones that haven’t seen the outside of your closet for years). It’s the music that you’re … | Continue reading